Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 11

Kane at the double as Bayern romp to first-leg win against 10-man Leverkusen

Something seemed to break here, and it was not just Xabi Alonso’s proud unbeaten record over Bayern Munich. For Vincent Kompany’s side are cruising to the Bundesliga title and now they are cruising to the Champions League quarter-finals too. They may well sign Bayer Leverkusen’s best player in the summer, but here they played him off the park. It smells like game over, and in more senses than one.

This week the Bayern director of sport, Max Eberl, made an eye-catching comparison. He compared Alonso and Kompany to Pep Guardiola and Jürgen Klopp, the coaching duopoly that shaped modern football for almost a decade. Bit soon for all that, most people reckoned, but it feels just a little less fanciful now. The bloke who got Burnley relegated to the Championship may just be the next big thing in European coaching.

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Chelsea fans grapple with the art of omission by Boehly’s trainee regime | Jonathan Liew

Think it is easy spending £1bn with no silverware in return? Leave it out! Letting down supporters is harder than it looks

“The one thing I’ve learned about the British press is they exaggerate a lot and leave stuff out.” The words of Todd Boehly there, the jaw-droppingly handsome Chelsea chair whose name was being sung so passionately by fans outside Stamford Bridge last week. “We want Boehly ! We want Boehly !” they sang in their thousands, alongside a sea of banners bearing the words “BOEHLY ” and “CLEARLAKE & BLUECO ”.

Clearly Chelsea fans cannot get enough of their hybrid-leadership apparat, and frankly who can blame them when their leaders are in this vein of form? Perhaps, as a functional human with a life, you missed Boehly’s appearance at the Financial Times Business of Football Summit on Thursday, where he treated the audience to a little of the privileged wisdom he has accumulated during his 33 months in the game.

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‘FA Cup of darts’ keeps grassroots flame alive as big-money era shapes to snuff it out

Intimate setting of the UK Open pits amateurs against professionals in a way that’s becoming increasingly rare

A pale pastel sun has settled over the Somerset coast. Two voices carry through the still of the dusk, over the shrieking seagulls and the roar of the surf. “ZOMBIE, ZOMBIE, ZOMBIE-BIE-BIE,” the voices chime. Fifty yards down the beach, William O’Connor smiles and waves. Most streets, most weeks, the world’s 49th-best darts player could take an evening stroll in total anonymity. But not this street. Not this week.

Inside the vast Skyline Pavilion, with 4,000 empty seats for company, Luke Humphries is throwing practice darts. Most of his rivals are taking a well-earned break between the afternoon and evening sessions, but Humphries likes to case the joint. He wants to pace the stage, visualise the moment, feel the way the air moves and circulates, and it moves differently at every venue. And that’s why Humphries is the best in the world.

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Grace Clinton shows a glimpse of England’s future and helps banish ghosts against Spain | Jonathan Liew

Midfielder is rich in potential and opened the doors against world champions to offer her team a dizzyingly high ceiling

The final whistle blows and players gather in the centre circle. Enmities are buried and old bonds reforged, pleasantries and shirts are swapped. Chloe Kelly is wrapped in the shirt of Leila Ouahabi. Likewise Jess Park and Laia Aleixandri. Sixty yards away, meanwhile, Grace Clinton is already on her lap of honour. She has resolved, with her characteristic speed of thought, that this shirt is going nowhere.

And if this was a game that seemed to arrive wreathed in ghosts of the past – Sydney, the pain, the bitter aftermath – then somehow it ended on a more optimistic, forward-looking note. This is an England team that have spent the past 18 months in varying states of entropy, labouring against the sort of opponents they should be swiping aside with a flick of the hand, torn between the Plan A that no longer works and the Plan B that does not yet exist.

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Mohamed Salah turns it up to 11: devotion, dexterity – and a new deal? | Jonathan Liew

Arguments around the Liverpool star’s future keep adding up, but what if we’re all asking the wrong question?

There are numbers, of course, if you choose to want them. Records enough to drown in. Discourse piled sky-high. Here: a colourful infographic setting out his most recent milestones, begging your finger for a double-tap. Here: a TV host in expensive trainers pointing at a very large screen. First for contingent goal involvements. First for final-third shimmies. Look at that shot throb velocity: up a staggering 0.28 on last season. After the break, some nonentities will debate today’s hot question: is Mo Salah enjoying the most venomous Premier League season ever? Stay tuned.

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‘Winning, losing, I wasn’t fussed’ – Adrian Lewis on quitting darts and hopes for a comeback

Double former world champion talks about falling out of love with the sport but hints a return could yet happen

“The thing with darts,” explains Adrian Lewis, “is you have to be in a happy place. It was for me, anyway. When you’re up, everything’s free, everything’s flowing. You don’t feel like you’ve got a burden on yourself.”

And when Lewis was free, when the darts flowed from his hand like water, when the 180s piled up around his ears, the man they called “Jackpot” could make this unfathomably difficult sport look like the simplest thing in the world. “Don’t think, just throw,” was his mantra. “Just get up there, get into a rhythm, bash-bash-bash.”

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What is the big idea? Levy’s second-class Tottenham Women mired in mediocrity | Jonathan Liew

Ambition for the women’s team – like the men’s – seems based on hanging in there until the big money starts rolling in

A couple of years ago it was reported that Daniel Levy, the man in charge of Tottenham Hotspur, was lobbying to abolish promotion and relegation to and from the Women’s Super League. Levy’s vision was of a steady-state league, with no mobility and therefore no real jeopardy, where the same teams competed for the same stuff every season. How we laughed. As it turned out, he needn’t have gone to the trouble. It pretty much ended up happening anyway.

For Tottenham at least, a season that began replete with possibility has buffed down to a blunt point. Marooned in mid-table, eliminated from both cup competitions, safe from relegation and well out of the Champions League race, their last nine games – starting with the north London derby at the Emirates on Sunday – are essentially pure content, dead rubbers, puff football. Will they put in a strong run of results and finish in fifth? Or will they falter and slump to seventh? Tune in to find out!

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Everton’s logic-defying derby leveller reminds us football cannot be tamed | Jonathan Liew

Tarkowski’s goal against Liverpool didn’t undo the mistakes of the past but Goodison sure embraced the madness

Before the actual ending, and then the melee that followed the ending, there was the original ending. The studio cut. The official’s board goes up to indicate five minutes of injury time. Vitalii Mykolenko puts a cross straight out of play. Jarrad Branthwaite and Carlos Alcaraz run into each other and bang heads. Tim Iroegbunam smashes a shot into the Gwladys Street End, and almost into Gwladys Street itself. The Liverpool fans are singing about winning the league at Goodison Park. Quite a few people are leaving.

And let’s be honest here: this would also have been a fitting way for the last Goodison Park derby to end. Certainly it would have felt truer to where Everton and Liverpool are right now, at the start of 2025, a park and an ocean between them. Everton make noises, run hard, crack their whips; Liverpool shoot them in the face. Before the game, the Opta supercomputer simulated this fixture 10,000 times and gave Liverpool a 60% chance of winning. As the clock ticks over to 97 minutes, the Opta supercomputer is doing victory laps of the office and taking high-fives.

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Plight of Reading shows how football fans’ dreams can easily spiral into a death vortex | Jonathan Liew

The Dai Yongge Show continues: eight seasons and counting at Reading. It is the soap opera no network can seem to cancel

And by our tennis balls shall you know us. And by our clown outfits and face paint shall you know us. And by our carefully worded media releases and painstaking analysis of tribunal documents shall you know us. And by the gigantic billboard we hired outside the train station shall you know us. Anyway, what we’re saying is: you know us. As for the next step … yeah, we’re working on that part.

“Ripped apart while the world watches” reads the aforementioned billboard outside Reading station. But is the world actually watching? Beyond the RG postcodes it was hard to identify too many concentric ripples from the news last week regarding another mysterious takeover bid for the club apparently falling through. It’s hard to drum up much interest in A Thing Not Happening, particularly when the transfer window is closing and the big beasts of the Premier League demand to be talked about at all times.

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‘Maybe they deserve to be a bit lucky’: Slot defends lineup after Plymouth loss

Liverpool manager rests senior players for later in seasonMuslic’s ‘biggest moment yet to come’ in league survival

Arne Slot defended his team selection after a weakened Liverpool lineup was turfed out of the FA Cup by Plymouth Argyle. Despite a shock 1-0 defeat against the Championship’s bottom club, Slot argued that his decision to give senior players a rest would pay dividends later in the season.

Slot made 10 changes from the win against Tottenham on Thursday night, with a relatively inexperienced bench and players such as Mohamed Salah, Cody Gakpo and Virgil van Dijk left out of the squad entirely.

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